“Dress ’em up young, and they’ll look young,” answered Jan, with composure. “Give ’em a bit of pleasure for once, Sibylla.”
“I’ll see,” impatiently answered Sibylla. “Jan, how came Nancy to go off with the Mormons? Tynn says she packed up her things in secret, and started.”
“How came the rest to go?” was Jan’s answer. “She caught the fever too, I suppose.”
“What Nancy are you talking of?” demanded Lionel. “Not Nancy from here!”
“Oh Lionel, yes! I forgot to tell you,” said Sibylla. “She is gone indeed. Mrs. Tynn is so indignant. She says the girl must be a fool!”
“Little short of it,” returned Lionel. “To give up a good home here for the Salt Lake! She will repent it.”
“Let ’em all alone for that,” nodded Jan. “I’d like to pay an hour’s visit to ’em, when they have been a month in the place—if they ever get to it.”
“Tynn says she remembers, when that Brother Jarrum was here in the spring, that Nancy made frequent excuses for going to Deerham in the evening,” resumed Sibylla. “She thinks it must have been to frequent those meetings in Peckaby’s shop.”
“I thought the man, Jarrum, had gone off, leaving the mischief to die away,” observed Lionel.
“So did everybody else,” said Jan. “He came back the day that you were married. Nancy’s betters got lured into Peckaby’s, as well as Nancy,” he added. “That sickly daughter at Chalk Cottage, she’s gone.”
Lionel looked very much astonished.
“No!” he uttered.
“Fact,” said Jan. “The mother came to me the morning after the flitting, and said she had been seduced away. She wanted to telegraph to Dr. West—”
Jan stopped dead, remembering that Sibylla was present, as well as Lionel. He leaped off the sofa.
“Ah, we shall see them all back some day, if they can only contrive to elude the vigilance of the Mormons. I’m off, Lionel; old Paynton will think I am not coming to-day. Good-bye, Sibylla.”
Jan hastened from the room. Lionel stood at the window, and watched him away. Sibylla glided up to her husband, nestling against him.
“Lionel, tell me. Jan never would, though I nearly teased his life out; and Deborah and Amilly persisted that they knew nothing. You tell me.”
“Tell you what, my dearest?”
“After I came home in the winter, there were strange whispers about papa and that Chalk Cottage. People were mysterious over it, and I never could get a word of explanation. Jan was the worst: he was coolly tantalising, and it used to put me in a passion. What was the tale told?”
An involuntary darkening of Lionel’s brow. He cleared it instantly, and looked down on his wife with a smile.
“I know of no tale worth telling you, Sibylla.”
“But there was a tale told?”
“Jan—who, being in closer proximity to Dr. West than any one, may be supposed to know best of his private affairs—tells a tale of Dr. West’s having set a chimney on fire at Chalk Cottage, thereby arousing the ire of its inmates.”
“Don’t you repeat such nonsense to me, Lionel; you are not Jan,” she returned, in a half peevish tone. “I fear papa may have borrowed money from the ladies, and did not repay them,” she added, her voice sinking to a whisper. “But I would not say it to any one but you. What do you think?”
“If my wife will allow me to tell her what I think, I should say that it is her duty—and mine now—not to seek to penetrate into any affairs belonging to Dr. West which he may wish to keep to himself. Is it not so, Sibylla mine?”
Sibylla smiled, and held up her face to be kissed.
“Yes, you are right, Lionel.”
Swayed by impulse, more than by anything else, she thought of her treasures upstairs, in the process of disinterment from their cases by Benoite, and ran from him to inspect them. Lionel put on his hat, and strolled out of doors.
A thought came over him that he would go and pay a visit to his mother. He knew how exacting of attention from him she was, how jealous, so to speak, of Sibylla’s having taken him from her. Lionel hoped by degrees to reduce the breach narrower and narrower. Nothing should be wanting on his part to effect it: he trusted that nothing would be wanting on Sibylla’s. He really wished to see his mother after his month’s absence: and he knew she would be pleased at his going there on this, the first morning of his return. As he turned into the high road, he met the vicar of Deerham, the Reverend James Bourne.
They shook hands. And the conversation led, not unnaturally, on the Mormon flight. As they were talking of it, Roy, the ex-bailiff, was observed crossing the opposite field.
“My brother tells me the report runs that Mrs. Roy contemplated being of the company, but was overtaken by her husband and brought back,” remarked Lionel.
“How it may have been, about his bringing her back, or whether she actually started, I don’t know,” replied Mr. Bourne, who was a man with a large pale face and iron-grey hair. “That she intended to go, I have reason to believe.”
He spoke the last words significantly, lowering his voice. Lionel looked at him.
“She paid me a mysterious visit at the vicarage the night before the start,” continued the clergyman. “A very mysterious visit, indeed, taken in conjunction with her words. I was in my study, reading by candle-light, when somebody came tapping at the glass door, and stole in. It was Mrs. Roy. She was in state of tremor, like I have heard it said she appeared the night the inquiry was held at Verner’s Pride, touching the death of Rachel Frost. She spoke to me in ambiguous terms of a journey she was about to take—that she should probably be away for her whole life—and then she proceeded to speak of that night.”
